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Jul. 8th, 2006 07:20 amI've been reading To Sail Beyond The Sunset again, partly because I keep forgetting that I have in fact read it all the way through at least once, and partly to try to pin down what it is that I began to see in Heinlein's later works that has put me off rereading his earlier ones.
Passing over his politics and his religious views, which are certainly more identifiable in the later books, and with which I have no sympathy whatsoever, I'm going to focus on a specific stylistic trope of his that grates on me every time he uses it, which is way too often. Try this - Pick up a late-period Heinlein book and open it at random, then read forward or back till you find a passage where two people on terms of intimacy are talking. See how far you get before one of the characters freezes up, adopts formal or legalistic speech patterns, and/or pretends to terminate the conversation. This nasty, childish method of bullying the other person into submission is rife in the later books (The Number Of The Beast has four people trapped in a smallish spaceship and they do it to each other *all the time*), but it's present, I believe, throughout the oeuvre, and it always works. Not one character, subjected to this treatment, calls the bluff.
I can't believe Heinlein thought this was a normal conversational technique between adults. I'd like to have seen him try it on his wife.
HIM: (sitting down to breakfast): This looks good. Pass the salt, darling.
HER: (juggling dishes, lunch preparations, laundry, secretarial duties and bathing the dog) I'm a little tied up here, dear, could you just reach for it?
HIM: (deadpan, standing up again) Madam, I regret that you do not see fit to honour a simple request. This breakfast is adjourned. I shall return when you are in a better frame of mind. (Makes to leave, not too fast)
HER: (dropping everything and grabbing the salt) Oh gee, I'm sorry, darling. Here you go.
HIM: (sitting down again) That's better. You should probably pick up that mess.
No, I can't see it.
I still reread Stranger, of course, but its flaws are more obvious to me these days, especially in the light of Sturgeon's Godbody, to which Heinlein wrote an introduction. It's kind of satisfying that Sturgeon did in a fraction of the length, with a cast of about six, what Heinlein struggled with for years, using two entire planets and a cast of thousands, and still didn't quite manage to bring off. Or am I being mean?
Passing over his politics and his religious views, which are certainly more identifiable in the later books, and with which I have no sympathy whatsoever, I'm going to focus on a specific stylistic trope of his that grates on me every time he uses it, which is way too often. Try this - Pick up a late-period Heinlein book and open it at random, then read forward or back till you find a passage where two people on terms of intimacy are talking. See how far you get before one of the characters freezes up, adopts formal or legalistic speech patterns, and/or pretends to terminate the conversation. This nasty, childish method of bullying the other person into submission is rife in the later books (The Number Of The Beast has four people trapped in a smallish spaceship and they do it to each other *all the time*), but it's present, I believe, throughout the oeuvre, and it always works. Not one character, subjected to this treatment, calls the bluff.
I can't believe Heinlein thought this was a normal conversational technique between adults. I'd like to have seen him try it on his wife.
HIM: (sitting down to breakfast): This looks good. Pass the salt, darling.
HER: (juggling dishes, lunch preparations, laundry, secretarial duties and bathing the dog) I'm a little tied up here, dear, could you just reach for it?
HIM: (deadpan, standing up again) Madam, I regret that you do not see fit to honour a simple request. This breakfast is adjourned. I shall return when you are in a better frame of mind. (Makes to leave, not too fast)
HER: (dropping everything and grabbing the salt) Oh gee, I'm sorry, darling. Here you go.
HIM: (sitting down again) That's better. You should probably pick up that mess.
No, I can't see it.
I still reread Stranger, of course, but its flaws are more obvious to me these days, especially in the light of Sturgeon's Godbody, to which Heinlein wrote an introduction. It's kind of satisfying that Sturgeon did in a fraction of the length, with a cast of about six, what Heinlein struggled with for years, using two entire planets and a cast of thousands, and still didn't quite manage to bring off. Or am I being mean?